Tag Archives: Purdue University

Who gains as Purdue University acquires on-line Kaplan University? For Kaplan, the sale has strong appeal. For-profit companies have been maliciously maligned by politicians and leftist ideologues, and the Obama Administration tried to kill them through regulations that largely did not apply to traditional not-for-profit institutions. Students will like the prestige of the Purdue name, so enrollments will grow, helping Kaplan receive fees from performing non-academic back-office functions.

Shedding the For-Profit Stigma

For Purdue, the deal jumpstarts its comparatively anemic presence in on-line education, buying expertise it simply does not have. It allows it to join the likes of Western Governors University and Southern New Hampshire University, on-line providers that have flourished in part because they don’t have the “for profit” stigma associated with them.

Purdue President Mitch Daniels views this as a natural extension of its land-grant mission, just as agricultural extension services and branch campuses have provided ways for individuals to learn at affordable prices. Daniels, previously a lawyer, budget guru, seasoned business executive, and governor, sees the deal as nearly no-risk for Purdue. Andy Rosen, CEO of Kaplan who, like Daniels, I know and respect greatly, sees this as a winner, as does, no doubt big stockholder Donald Graham.

Yet according to news accounts, the Purdue Faculty Senate said the deal “violated both common sense educational practice and respect for the Purdue faculty….” A long-time nemesis of for-profits and the architect of much of the Obama Administration’s war on them, Robert Shireman, referred to the Kaplan-Purdue deal as “a dangerous long-term marriage between a public university and a firm answerable to Wall Street investors.”

The biggest threat to the deal probably comes not from the faculty, but from the cartel that controls entry into higher education, notably the Higher Learning Commission, Purdue’s regional accreditor. It would not let Grand Canyon convert from for-profit to not-for-profit status, and may do the same to Purdue. The defenders of the status quo (faculty interests, other universities) will try to use accreditation to stop this effort by Purdue to do the equivalent of creating another branch campus. This is another reason why accreditation as we know it should die.

To me, the deal makes a lot of sense. Purdue uses expertise it does not have to expand its educational outreach and improve access. Kaplan probably will gain too, partially just because the word “Purdue” is worth more than the word “Kaplan.” If the new entity is truly part of Purdue, the faculty will ultimately gain some control over curriculum content and teaching. At my school, the main campus faculty has only limited control over those at the branch campuses, and it is not a big issue. I suspect the same will become true at Purdue.

Faculty Want in

What this controversy really is about, however, is ownership. As the late Henry Manne pointed out first over 45 years ago, so-called “not-for-profit” universities like Purdue really generate financial surpluses (“quasi-profits”) that get distributed –much as they do at private corporations. These distributed surpluses are often like dividends.

The problem is the ownership of Purdue, unlike that of private companies, is ambiguous. Legally, probably the state of Indiana owns the institution, and the state turns its ownership interest over to university trustees for administration. Yet the faculty call for “shared governance” is as much a call for “shared ownership.” The faculty thinks, “There would be no Purdue without us —we are entitled to an ownership interest in the enterprise. We want to share in the surpluses.” Yet the Trustees, Mitch Daniels, and Indiana taxpayers may disagree – they are other claimants for at least some ownership rights.

President Daniels has been disruptive of traditional arrangements. He has not raised tuition fees during his tenure. Higher tuition fees are revenues to be distributed, at least in part, as “dividends” to faculty, administrators, and others. He has personally accepted a lower base salary than most university presidents, wanting to be rewarded by bonuses for superior performance. He occasionally sits with students during football games instead of indulging in the perks of the presidential suite. I suspect the students love him –as did the voters who twice elected him governor by solid majorities. He does not bow excessively to collegiate elites.

Too Many Going to College

So, despite having a faculty orientation embedded in my DNA, I am supportive of Daniels move. Higher education is in a bit of a crisis –yet much of it does not know it, being largely shielded by public (state government appropriations, federal student tuition assistance) and private largess (endowments, alumni donations). Enrollments in the aggregate are falling as costs continue to rise and benefits stagnate or even fall.

“Creative destruction” (Joseph Schumpeter) or “disruptive innovation” (Clayton Christensen) are needed to make higher education more nimble, efficient, productive, and responsive to societal needs. Thus, a good case can be made for Daniels’ latest in a long series of innovations that includes the tuition freeze, Income Share Agreements, textbook deals with Amazon, etc.

The strongest case against pushing a big on-line expansion actually is an argument the faculty would emphatically not support: there are simply too many kids going to college, and Daniels’ move is likely to aggravate that problem. The private rate of return on college investments is falling, and the so-called “positive externalities” of higher education are, conservatively put, overstated.

That said, given the policy environment and the attitudes of Americans, higher education, while beset with problems, is not going away soon. Educational entrepreneurs like Mitch Daniels are responding to the changing environment, in the process transforming American higher education. albeit too slowly.

Richard Vedder directed the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and teaches economics at Ohio University. He is also an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

On January 18, the academic leadership of Purdue University received a letter from Mark Smith, dean of the graduate school. It said:

On behalf of the Diversity Leadership Team, I’d like to invite you to attend a special safe zone training session … arranged exclusively for deans, associate deans, and department heads.

This, you must understand, was not an invitation but a disguised summons. Diversity enthusiasts like Smith stress on our overwhelmingly liberal campuses that faculties need lots of training amid non-minorities to protect gays, women and ethnic and racial minorities.

We hope all (or at least most) of our faculty will become safe zone certified in the near future, which would be a quantum leap for our campus on the diversity metric scale. Many thanks in advance for your support and participation.

Safe Spaces are of course designated places on campus where identity groups and their allies cluster to avoid supposed stereotyping, marginalization, and persecution. LGBT Safe Zone certification goes much farther, involving indoctrination sessions, where correct principles are announced, not debated, semi-coerced faculty pledges to act as “allies,” then displaying rainbow badges on office doors or in classrooms to signal support.

Are identity groups at Purdue in such peril that high campus officials need to sign a contract and be formally designated, after three hours of training in diversity principles, as safe zone certified? There’s very little real discrimination left on campus of the kind that LGBT activists want to quell; except for the rare kook, pretty much everyone opposes the kind of intolerance and homophobia presented as threats. Even sympathetic faculties think such diversity training sessions are a silly waste of time. Yet they are also career essentials.

This veiled coercion should offend liberals – but doesn’t. It should terrify anyone unwilling to profess full allegiance and faith to the diversity catechism.

What’s disconcerting, or should be, Purdue is one of the saner colleges and universities around, with a big STEM element, and run by the able president, Mitch Daniels. We are not talking about Wesleyan or Bard. Purdue is a land-grant university in the state that gave the nation Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. It’s a long way from Vermont or the Left Coast. And what’s going on at Purdue is also going on — often far more aggressively — at hundreds of colleges and universities nationwide. With American Federation of Teachers endorsement, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is pushing safe zones in middle- and high-schools nationwide.

Purdue explains in its promotional flyer that “the purpose of the Safe Zone program is to challenge homophobia, transphobia, cisgenderism, and heterosexism by encouraging welcoming and inclusive environments for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer or Questioning, Asexual, and Ally.” using language almost identical to hundreds of other programs. (Intersex and Asexual are recent Purdue additions.) As the flyer puts it,

Upon completion of the workshop, attendees can choose to become a Safe Zone member by completing a contract expressing their commitment to supporting diversity and inclusion.

A loyalty oath to the diversity movement is being sought here. The parallels to the McCarthy era loyalty oaths are striking. There’s more:

Additionally, Safe Zone members display a placard in a visible location such as a door to an office or residence hall that identifies them [and] dedicated safe spaces on campus for LGBTQ people to connect with allies in the community.

At schools nationwide, then, a placard or rainbow-colored sticker appears on an office door so the kids will know a professor’s office or classroom office is a “safe zone” occupied by an “ally.” Whole hallways in august universities are now so decorated. Don’t these badges stigmatize non-stickered faculty?

Moreover, when a graduate dean writes such a letter to fellow deans and department heads across this 38,000- student university, who signs ups and who doesn’t will be noted, however obliquely. Who gets Safe Zone certified, that too: who obeys and who does not, who answers the call. When Smith calls the advent of safe zones a quantum leap for our campus on the diversity metric scale, he signals to deans and department heads that diversity is the right and proper metric, the sacred creed of the modern university. Put up your rainbow sticker or suffer the consequences.

The word ally utterly misses the mark of education. It re-purposes college life and degrades it. Safe Zones encourage instructors whose expertise is in literature or social science to dive into private spheres that might best be left to other authorities such as family, or if need be, psychologists. Instructors have a task to perform: cerebral, ethical and aesthetic. As allies, they turn into life coaches or voyeurs.

Laity assumes that after the good laugh, higher education will get a grip. But the summonses and the autos-da-fé are destined to go on. The campus Diversity Machine operates with religious zeal, and it hates heretics. Federal regulations, state and federal money, tuition payments and student loans, and prevailing moral sentiments are its batteries.

The outlay and opportunity cost are vast. The debasing process to get your rainbow sticker requires personnel, offices, training sessions, facilities, and centers. This apparatus not only crowds out academic learning. It mixes a large number of single-interest ideologues with serious scholars, leading to institutional confusion and turmoil.

Don’t forget that Purdue is a public institution. Safe Zone indoctrination sessions, ally contracts, and rainbow stickers are your government at work. But federal safe-space directives to public and private colleges and universities alike try to make sure that no one is left behind. Legislatures and taxpayers, tuitions and endowments, bear the burden. So do society and culture.

Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and editor of The Eighties: A Reader. He is also a non-fiction book reviewer for Publishers Weekly.